During COVID (well, not just during COVID, but this kind of thing became popular then), many artists and creative types with online platforms started daily challenges. Things like sharing a photo a day, or a drawing a day, or a collage a day, etc. We were all unmoored from a normal sense of time, and keeping to a daily practice offered some people a kind of line to hold onto.
I think about my time in shidduchim, all these years and years, and obviously it’s not quite like living through the urgency and immediacy of a pandemic, but it’s disorienting in its own way. (Joke will be when I get married and realize that just being an adult is disorienting and it wasn’t shidduchim after all. Lol). I’m navigating these timescapes without landmarks like, now is the time of life to focus on raising little kids. Now it’s summer vacation. Now we all do this or that. It’s true that I have responsibilities that add a structure to my life, and I can create traditions to an extent, but if I think too deeply about all this, I feel adrift. Do you relate?
It doesn’t help that a big part of me wants to simply stop time, period.
A while ago I found another blogger’s “COVID diary” in which she wrote daily updates for the first five months or so. I thought about what it would look like to apply the daily log format to my blog. Just little dispatches from the island. “Today I worked from home and was super sedentary as often happens on my WFH days. I’ve read that it’s important to get 10 minutes of sunlight in the first 30 minutes after waking and I legitimately never do that. Isn’t that something worth striving for? It sounds so pleasant. I did walk (a quick 5-6 minutes) to the grocery store during my lunch break. Later I held a book club meeting for our 65+ clients, which was a delight as usual! My mother invited me for supper which was so helpful because I hadn’t remembered to put my frozen chicken in the oven. Though I wanted to do some reading tonight, I got distracted with writing this post and working on some other things and eating an ice cream ball. It was a good day.”
Or perhaps to tie it to a daily challenge, like a daily poem or comforting thought or psychological insight or list. Or maybe, glimmers I noticed or things I am grateful for. But something daily to mark time, to notch another tally mark in the tree trunk. To know how long I’ve been here? To have a record of what I saw and felt and did with the time I’ve been here? To make it matter?
I know time isn’t really different just because I’m single. I know there is not much sense in logging the days as if I’m marooned on an island. Yet it has an appeal. Maybe because it’s part of believing that this time on the island will end. Or maybe it makes it easier to stay in the present. To occupy and enjoy and experience the present in an immersive way without planning too far into the future. Just taking it day by day. One day at a time, on the island.
